Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.

This is a very interesting Czechoslovakian art film about a band of 8 young women and an older woman who was alive before an apocalyptic event that killed most of the people and animals on the planet. The older woman has been wandering around with the young women for years, hoping to find some men they can breed with to carry on the human race.

Early in the film we see two of the women (we don't know the names of most of the women), a blonde and a brunette, fill up a large plastic bag full of water at a waterfall, then hang it from a branch and carry it through the forest. The brunette stops and screams in terror at a snake basking on a rock and we hear the water bag fall. The blonde creeps up and touches the snake. She picks it up by the tail and looks it over, then she grabs it by the neck and begins trying to twist its head off. She finally throws it at the brunette who screams again and runs away. The blonde then stomps on the snake with her boot and picks up the empty water bag.

This is just one scene where we learn that the women are basically savages. Humankind has reverted to a barbaric pre-civilized state after the apocalypse. The women enjoy setting fires and sadistically killing animals, as well as killing and butchering them for food. I have no problem with the depiction of their cruelty to animals to show their savage state and their survival skills, but it is appalling that they used a live snake in the scene and the actress really tried to twist its head off, though we can't tell if she actually stomped on it because it was hidden behind a rock. Even though this movie was made almost 50 years ago in a country behind the "Iron Curtain" where freedom was limited and the budget for this movie was probably so low that even replacing the live snake with a realistic fake snake was not possible, there is not now and there never was any excuse for torturing and killing an animal for art or entertainment. (It looks like they also killed a live dog, a live cow, and live fish for the movie, but the cow and fish were being slaughtered for food, which some will find excusable.) There is also probably the typical Eve and the serpent association we're supposed to make here, since we're dealing with women and a snake in a sort of anti-Garden of Eden.

I don't know what kind of snake they used, but it appears to be some type of viper, a venomous snake (though not all of them are dangerous) so you have to give credit to the actress for handling it.